Whats wrong with multi-marathonning?

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plodding hippo Feb 2013 4:52pm, 28 Feb 2013 47,320 posts	0 plodding hippo I do take a lot of time to run a marathon though as well
hellen Feb 2013 5:15pm, 28 Feb 2013 14,112 posts	0 hellen Hipps, its not really that bad doing them on your own and it takes so much less time as no travelling and packing needed
AdminLiz Feb 2013 5:20pm, 28 Feb 2013 1,825 posts	0 AdminLiz I'm with hipps, couldn't do those long runs on my own, 10 miles is about my limit.
Nelly Feb 2013 5:20pm, 28 Feb 2013 767 posts	0 Nelly Hipps, did you just agree with ptb that you do "time travelling"? No wonder you've done so many marathons (and parkruns)
Gobi Feb 2013 5:32pm, 28 Feb 2013 50,491 posts	0 Gobi Easy marathon - pacing makes it easy It is that simple Hipps
Gobi Feb 2013 5:41pm, 28 Feb 2013 50,492 posts	0 Gobi Easy marathon - pacing makes it easy It is that simple Hipps
Gobi Feb 2013 5:42pm, 28 Feb 2013 50,493 posts	0 Gobi That easy
eL Bee! Feb 2013 5:45pm, 28 Feb 2013 18,377 posts	0 eL Bee! Very easy, in fact
FenlandFunRunner Feb 2013 6:17pm, 28 Feb 2013 15,385 posts	0 FenlandFunRunner Agree yet again with Gobi. Running a marathon around the four hour mark does now feel relatively easy. Hopefully that's because my real max is now thirty minutes quicker?
Canute Feb 2013 7:00pm, 28 Feb 2013 519 posts	0 Canute HappyG, The question of why improving ability to run at a pace faster than MP should help you run a fast marathon is a good question. I do not have any compelling answer apart from the fact that it seems to work. As others have pointed out in this discussion, running a fast marathon is about both speed and distance. There is little doubt that simply running a marathon without hitting the wall requires the development of a dense capillary supply to the slow twitch fibres together with the ability to metabolise fat efficiently. Running lots of slow miles is good way of achieving these goals. I believe the surest way to achieve a moderately good marathon performance is to do lots of slow miles, together with a modest amount of running at MP. But once you can run marathon at a moderate pace without hitting the wall, you then need to improve your ability to minimise the accumulation of acidity at faster paces. I think that fairly fast tempo runs and long intervals (typical of 5K and 10K training) is one way of doing this, though not necessarily the only way. Once you can avoid accumulating of acidity at a fairly fast pace, you can run at MP in some of your long training runs without severe stress, and hence do high quality marathon-specific training. So one approach to achieving a fast marathon is to start with a lot of slow long runs to establish the base; then spend 4 to 6 months focusing on 5K-10K type training, with only a minor emphasis on the long runs. After that comes the marathon specific training period where the key sessions are long runs including increasing amounts at MP, together with quite a lot of easy runs and a small amount of faster stuff. That is certainly not the only way to train for a marathon, but it is roughly what I did forty-five years ago – except that most of the long slow stuff was hill walking and mountaineering, the 5K-10K stuff was 5000m track training and racing for about 5 months of the year, and the marathon specific work was crammed into a few months before the marathon. In my second marathon I did 2:33 (I recently located that result in an internet archive) and the following year I was sub 2:30 though I do not have record of the exact time. Neither I nor my club mates regarded me as a serious nor gifted athlete, though I suppose I must have been blessed with an abundance of slow twitch fibres. Because I enjoyed being in the mountains, and life was too busy for both running and mountaineering, I then stopped running. I have only taken it up again fairly recently. I am at present working on a program along the above lines, hoping to run a reasonable marathon in 2014, though so far I am a bit dismayed to find just how much my legs have lost the springiness of youth – it feels like only the slow twitch fibres have survived and I need to do something to get some strength back into my stride so I have added some resistance work into the mix.